City look frightening – Rose

Danny Rose said Tottenham are looking forward to repeating last season's feat of being the first team to beat Manchester City in the league.

Published

14 December 2017

Danny Rose described Manchester City's recent form as "frightening" but said Tottenham are relishing the opportunity to end the Premier League leaders' 15-game winning streak.

Mauricio Pochettino's side travel to the Etihad Stadium on Saturday to face a City team that broke an English league record for successive victories by defeating Swansea City on Wednesday.

City's 4-0 thumping of Swansea kept them 11 points clear at the summit and 17 ahead of fourth-placed Tottenham, who have won two on the trot after failing to triumph in any of the prior four.

Rose, who featured in Tottenham's 2-2 draw at the Etihad in January, told the Evening Standard: "They're in good form. They do look very frightening - scoring goals and they've kept a clean sheet against Swansea.

"We've done alright there in the past couple of seasons and that should give us some confidence at the weekend."

The 27-year-old said Spurs' 5-1 home win over Stoke City and subsequent 2-0 defeat of Brighton and Hove Albion gave them reasons to be confident, along with the fact that they were the undoing of unbeaten runs by Chelsea and City in 2016-17.

"It puts us into good form going into a very difficult game," said Rose. "We'll go there and relish it.

"We were the first ones to beat City last season and we disrupted Chelsea's unbeaten run. It's another challenge we all look forward to.

"It's a challenge the manager looks forward to."

Defeats at Manchester United and Arsenal in the Premier League have raised doubts over Tottenham's ability to compete with the division's elite this season, but Rose pointed to comprehensive victories over Liverpool and Real Madrid as evidence to the contrary.

"There's going to be a lot of eyes watching us this weekend," he said. "We haven't done so well away from home against the top teams this season so we hope to go there with some confidence and keep pushing on.

"We know our standards and whenever we slip from those standards the manager lets us know. We look forward to going there and being the first team to beat them this season, as we did last year.

"We don't go into games thinking this three points is bigger than another three points. It was an amazing night beating Real Madrid, it was amazing thrashing Liverpool.

"If we go there and win it will be massive but it will be nothing short of what we expect of each other."